Steve Schmidt
If you hang around politics long enough, you tend to get disappointed by people.Collection: Politics
I would find it difficult to be involved in an effort that I think disenfranchises people from a fundamental right. How do you work with people who are opposed to marriage equality? I don't want to do it.Collection: Equality
A mark of stupidity is a belief that one party is totally virtuous and correct on the issues while the other is evil and always wrong.
Trump is what the Russians call a useful idiot, someone in service to the Russian Federation, either unwitting or wittingly.
It's part of the mythology now in the Republican Party that there's widespread voter fraud all across the country. In fact, there's not.
Liberal democracy is in regression all over the world, and it's a dangerous thing.
What destroyed the Republican Party isn't Trump. It's the obedience to Trump from servile leaders like McConnell and Ryan who could have put a check on him. They have gotten their place in political history. They'll be remembered as vile.
The country badly needs to have a right-of-center political party, grounded in traditional values that the Republican Party represented till it didn't.
Mitch McConnell has, as much as anyone, done great damage to the United States Senate as an institution that was once known as the world's greatest deliberative body.
This is not Trumpistan.
So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It's over. It doesn't exist anymore.
For there to be any redemption of a right of center conservative party in the United States of America means the party of Trump must be destroyed politically.
For there to be new growth of a conservative movement, of a right center party, the one that I joined in 1988, it needs to burn to the ground.
I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly.
When Trump was elected, there were three parties in Washington: the Trump party, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
I think it's important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.
If you want to oppose Trump, the first thing you should do is say, 'I'm not going to do one thing that makes it worse.' Because making it worse helps Trump. Part of the damage of this era is his debasement and his purposeful divisions. That's unique in all of history.
There's never been an era absent of demagogues.
Howard Schultz is a hell of a man, a hell of a leader.
Birtherism is a fringe issue that's way out of the mainstream, and it's disturbing when you see people you... have some level of respect for, whether it's members of Congress or even Donald Trump, falling into that category.
Trump makes no pretense about being the commander in chief of all of the country, being president of all of the people, including the people who voted against him. He is, in effect, a tribal chieftain who has declared war on half of the country.
But I'm not particularly aligned with the Democratic Party's policy agenda.
I profoundly believe that the Democratic Party is the only vehicle we have to put a check on Donald Trump.
My fidelity is to my country, not my political party. Country first.
Whether they're for good or bad, all trends in the United States start in California.
To see the Republican Party break up the way it has to lose its moral compass it is tragic, it's tragic for me personally, but I won't be part of it. I won't share a party label with people who think it's all right to put babies in internment camps.
As a conservative myself that, you know, generally I would have a point of view that less regulation is better than more regulation, but less regulation shouldn't supersede a tax on the fundamentally important institutions that sustain a democratic republic.
The reality is that our Founders always predicted that one day there would be a president like Trump, and that's why they designed the system of government the way they designed it.
My role in Palin is something that there's not a day that has gone by that I don't have regret about.
Trump was legitimized by birtherism, and he was abetted by a billion-dollar incitement industry.
Politics always fascinated me. In my 20s, I was involved in politics and, as I look in the mirror, not for the noblest of purposes. It was for sport.
Whether you're Democrat or Republican... you want everybody who's eligible to vote to vote, and that's how you want to win elections.
I don't want to sit here and disparage Paul Ryan the man, because he's a good guy. He's a moral person. He's a decent person.
It's not just that there's no other spokesperson for the executive seat of power in a democratic republic anywhere in the world where you see that type of lying. It's that there's never been a spokesman for the executive seat in power who is such a prolific liar as Sarah Sanders.
I've been involved in a lot of victories and I've been involved in defeats.
I think there are really serious problems in this country and I think politics in a lot of ways is failing the country.
I've certainly done more than my fair share of pouncing on a stupid issue to win the news cycle of the day, to distract from what are real and important issues.
One of the things I'm keen on doing is really revealing the degree to which the conservative movement, and by extension the Republican Party, has become a racket.
I do think there is every potential in 2010 and 2012 to begin to see independent candidates who are capturing a significant percentage of the vote and even win.
We have 57 choices of ketchup and 500 TV channels. Very nearly everything has been disrupted in the country, from how we buy groceries to how we consume news, except for the system that produces the political leadership of the country.
I just want to say about Beto O'Rourke and Andrew Gillum, I mean, every superhero has to have the right nemesis. And for Beto O'Rourke, he's been very lucky in his choice of oppositional villains to run against.
One of the things that is for sure unique, we have never seen in this country a billion dollar propaganda industry in full service and in absolute control of an administration in the way that FOX News is.
Politicians have an acutely honed instinct for self-preservation.
A lot of people like me who worked in Republican politics had a personal set of beliefs on issues that were at variance with the candidates that we worked for.
Your average Republican member of Congress, if you played a word association game with them and said, 'Latino,' they're going to respond 'illegal immigrant,' as opposed to 'sergeant major' or 'surgeon' or 'professor.'
I love little kids, I hate little kids being used by cynical politicians, though.
I've spent my life in the Republican party, it gives me no pleasure to say this. This party has demonstrated a complete incapacity to govern. Period.
The government is corrupted. It's corrupted. It is not about regular people.
It's gratifying to work for somebody who doesn't measure accomplishment by the temporary state of public-opinion polls.
I think that more and more Americans are insistent that, at a minimum, gay couples should be treated with respect and when they see a political party trying to stigmatize a group of people who are hardworking, who play by the rules, who raise decent families, they're troubled by it.